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A few problems with this Fable's project: 1. It's not Python by any means, it's a subset with its own runtime, its own quirks and nuances; 2. It will be impos
by leobuskin 2mo ago
A few problems with this Fable's project:
1. It's not Python by any means, it's a subset with its own runtime, its own quirks and nuances;
2. It will be impossible to maintain parity with CPython without AI assistance;
3. It will die the same way as dozens of similar (even non-AI projects) died before, and reasons will be the same: (1) and (2).
- subarctic 2mo ago"Without ai assistance" - ok, but what about with ai assistance?
- zahlman 2mo agoFor a project like this, relying on AI assistance also makes it effectively dead in the water.
- frollogaston 2mo agoNot convinced. I was looking for an answer like "it doesn't actually have parity with CPython." If it does, that's a decent indication that it can be sustained.
- minimaxir 2mo agoWhy?
- all2 2mo agoTime-cost for machines instead of willing knowledgeable humans. The former requires money, the latter requires passion. Arguably, passion for a project is without price.
- zero1009 2mo agoSomeone pays for the AI? That's the new human maintainer.
- bloppe 2mo agoHypothetically, maybe. In practice, probably not.
- CookieCrisp 2mo agoIf it's valuable enough to someone, and it isn't keeping up, someone will pay. If it's not valuable enough for someone to pay, then who cares?
- jpfromlondon 2mo agoPlenty of important things have been born of passion without necessity.
- nozzlegear 2mo agoWho will pay if someone, somewhere is not passionate about it?
- throw1234567891 2mo agoYou can spin up a model locally and pay yourself. Who will maintain the project if the passionate sole maintainer burns out?
- inigyou 2mo agoWhich model works well?
- all2 2mo agoQwen 3.6 27b at q6 works decently well on 24GB of VRAM
- nozzlegear 2mo agoI strictly use only local models, so I agree, but the project was built with Fable so my argument hinges on the assumption that the maintainer is going to continue using Fable and needs to pay for it.
- jack_pp 2mo agoHumans have time-cost too, much higher than machines. Considering SOTA right now, for a project like this it would make more sense for the community to contribute and verify tests, sponsor updates with $.
- bt1a 2mo ago[flagged]
- wild_pointer 2mo agoTrust
- simonw 2mo agoGood luck implementing and then maintaining a project of this size and complexity at ~100 lines of verified code per human developer per day.
- mwcampbell 2mo agoI wonder how you arrived at that number. Is it perhaps a number that we should aspire to, if we want to write high-quality, maintainable code by hand?
- simonw 2mo agoI've been doing some reading recently around what the literature expects a professional software engineer to produce in a day. In ~1976 Mythical Man Month era it was around 5 lines of fully debugged assembly. Code Complete 2nd edition ~2004 bumped that up to 10-50 delivered lines of code per day. I found other estimates of around 20-60. I need to pull them altogether into a cited article. Based on that plus my own experience I think 100 lines per day of production-level, reviewed and debugged code was a reasonably higher target for a professional software engineer up until just a couple of years ago. Today I'm frequently pushing 2,000 to 4,000 - and that's not vibe coded junk (I can easily hit 10,000+ if I'm not reviewing anything), that's code that I've reviewed and am happy to put my name to. Obviously counting lines of code is a stupid, easily gamed metric. But I still think there's signal there. If you want to build a sophisticated piece of software you're going to have to write a bunch of code to do it. Writing at 1,000+ lines of code per day vs 100 will get you there faster.
- leobuskin 2mo agoIt's possible, but we're at the moment when most of us can ask Fable to implement a custom compiler to a custom target for our favorite language, and even use it as a part of custom solution. Why do I need someone else's implementation? Where's the magic in this project? What's the secret sauce?
- coldtea 2mo ago>Where's the magic in this project? What's the secret sauce? Someone else paying for the tokens. Also someone seeing it through (should that come). Obviously we're not "at the moment when most of us can ask Fable to implement a custom compiler to a custom target for our favorite language, and even use it as a part of custom solution", without thousands to spare and lots of time to shape the solution.
- cyanydeez 2mo agoIt's like we invented a worse github.
- coldtea 2mo agoGimphub.
- dotancohen 2mo agoTo be fair, most of the training data likely came from GitHub.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- hannasanarion 2mo agoEven if it does cost thousands (does it? I genuinely have no idea how to scope such a thing) that might be a good price if a custom compiler to your custom target is something you really want. People have paid far more for far less. If you're a hobbyist trying to compile python to your weird little arduino based thing, then that's a lot of money and you would want to use somebody else's solution, no doubt. But if you're an aerospace company trying to compile for a flight control computer (and I guess you really want to use python for some reason), spending thousands of dollars on tokens to make and maintain a custom compiler could represent serious savings. The big picture impact of AI that I see/anticipate the most is SAAS dying out because AI coding makes this kind of enablement and support software easier to make in-house, and this feels like an example of that, but maybe I'm seeing what I expect to see.
- bt1a 2mo agoit will be impossible to maintain parity with wetware
- up2isomorphism 2mo agoThen the question is why? Because that is an another way of saying donating tokens.
- rurban 2mo agoReading is hard. It runs and passes the full cpython testsuite, just 5x faster. With AI it's 100x easier to maintain than by hand. It reminds my on pperl. same approach using crane lift. Looks good
- leobuskin 2mo agoIt passes only curated corpus (snippets), not the full CPython test suite. So, yes, reading is hard. Nothing against AI, btw.
- ubercore 2mo agoHow am I misreading this part of the readme? > What is explicitly not done yet — this is the active roadmap, in order: > CPython test suite (cpython-full): the standing grind; failures are clustered and burned down per wave.
- bunderbunder 2mo agoThe “status” section of the project’s readme explicitly says that it is not passing the full test suite, and that the AOT compiler passes fewer tests than the JIT one. It also explicitly says that they’re still working on building out the standard library. I’m maybe not as pessimistic as leobuskin, but they are absolutely right that this is not the first time someone has tried to build an alternative Python implementation, and that all previous ones have failed because they weren’t able to get close enough to 100% parity to be acceptable to most users. Python is an unusually quirky language. I kind of wonder if “written in Rust” adds an extra headwind here because there’s nothing even remotely memory-safe about Python’s extension mechanism. I don’t know enough to know, but I have read about the death of a few of these projects in the past and a common theme of the post-mortem seems to be, “It went so smoothly at the start that we were caught off guard how much of a brick wall the last 5% was going to be.”
- anitil 2mo agoYour reply would have been much better without the first line [0] > Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that" [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- TZubiri 2mo ago>1. It's not Python by any means, it's a subset with its own runtime, its own quirks and nuances; A subset of python is python. Half a tomato is still tomato >2. It will be impossible to maintain parity with CPython without AI assistance What does that even mean? If you would have said that it's impossible to update to python 3.15 of further, I'd get it.
- geraneum 2mo ago> A subset of python is python. Half a tomato is still tomato The funny thing about this is not that the first sentence is wrong, which it is. It’s the failed reductio ad absurdum.
- skeledrew 2mo ago> A subset of python is python. Half a tomato is still tomato A subset of a calculator is still a calculator, but that subset definitely can't do everything the full version can.
- cwillu 2mo agoMost subsets of a physical calculator are properly called “a broken calculator”.
- skeledrew 2mo agoThis isn't about the shell of a calculator though, but the functionality. Like if the only operations are addition and subtraction, theoretically you could derive the effects of other operations but it's extremely limiting.
- bunderbunder 2mo agoSo yeah, half of Python might still be Turing-complete, but it wouldn’t really be Python for any practical purpose. Just like how a device that can’t multiply or divide is not a 4-function calculator; it’s more like an adding machine. Many of which did multiply by serial addition.